Multi-task systems are system in which there is a plurality of separate tasks to be performed. Each task may be performed by a different agent and may be allocated accordingly. In some cases, the agents are not necessarily committed to the system and there may be no guarantee that they will perform tasks in a reasonable quality. The tasks may be tasks of performing a service, performing a computation, providing computational resources, producing content, providing ideas, or the like.
Crowd-sourcing is a methodology in which “free” agents perform tasks in a multi-task system. In crowd-sourcing, contributions are solicited from a large group of people, such as from online communities, rather than from traditional non-free agents, such as employees or suppliers. In some cases, crowd-sourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (e.g., when the job is performed collaboratively), but may also be undertaken by sole individuals. The process may combine efforts of numerous self-identified volunteering agents or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result.
Crowd-sourcing may be used for human-powered solving of large scale problems in numerous domains such as image classification, data entry, optical character recognition, recommendation, and proofreading. In recent years, more and more tasks are done via some sort of crowd sourcing. Examples include routing, such as using reports from a community (e.g., WAZE™), sourcing the community for funding (e.g. KICKSTARTER™), solving hard problems such as protein folding (e.g., FOLD IT™), developing software (e.g., SOURCEFORGE™) and more. In some cases, tasks are assigned to agents that perform them without long term relationship or commitment such as exists e.g. in a traditional work place or when using traditional contractors.